A cogent argument demonstrating that a knowledgeable awareness of the rich dynamics that drive societies will better help...
Without the establishment of Islam, writes former CIA official Fuller (New Turkish Republic: Turkey As a Pivotal State in the Muslim World, 2007, etc.), the religion of the East would predominately still be Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and probably as hostile to the West as it was before the fall of Constantinople.
In focusing all its rage against Islam in the pursuit of the eradication of terrorism, the West has lost sight of the key role of “geopolitical considerations of power” over theological differences. Islamism, rather than Islam, has become just one of many ideological vehicles employed against Western interventionism, imperialism and colonialism, and the rise of its new forms of resistance—fundamentalism and terrorism—is as predictable as, say, the Reformation grievances against the Catholic Church. The author provides a broad, far-flung survey of historical currents that have fed the West-East divide, namely how the early centuries of peaceful Christian conversion in the Middle East gave way to orthodoxy and the organization of a state structure in the form of the Byzantine Empire, which broke with Rome and vigorously suppressed “a smorgasbord of heresies.” The relatively recent religion on the scene, Islam, united dissonant tribal entities of the region and opened Islam to non-Arabs, an organic development that Fuller views as “an important process of fusion.” The author considers the Crusades as an expansionist move by the West, in response to external marauding forces, and demonstrates how the breakaway elements in the Protestant Reformation “opened the door” to more liberal (or literal) interpretations of orthodoxy, in much the same way that modern Islamist movements have broken away from (or adhered more strictly to) the Islamic party line. Fuller offers a useful survey of Muslim communities in Russia, India and China, and looks at how Islam—rather than Arab nationalism, for example—has become today’s tool in resistance to the West.
A cogent argument demonstrating that a knowledgeable awareness of the rich dynamics that drive societies will better help diffuse tensions.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04119-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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